The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

18th-century Commonwealthmen in Great Britain, such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, were admirers of the republican experiments of the 17th century and suspicious of the extension of ministerial power though patronage in the 18th century. Colonial Americans avidly read their writings, particularly Cato’s Letters (1720-1723), and created a coherent political ideology from their ideas that predisposed them to view British policy after 1763 not as ill-informed missteps but as evidence of a conspiracy to deprive the colonists of their rights and liberty. This ideology, combined with the colonists’ accumulated grievances, sparked the American Revolution, and led to the decision for independence from Great Britain.

The traditional British use of the word “constitution” signified the existing arrangement of government institutions. Under the pressure of the colonists’ need to distinguish principles from institutions during the Anglo-American crisis, a new definition of “constitution” emerged in America as a set of fixed principles that placed a boundary on government actions. Bailyn suggests that the peculiar colonial circumstances had prepared colonists for the concept of a written constitution, since written charters had been used as frames of government in the colonies for over a century.

According to the colonists’ view of history, political and social corruption endangered liberty. Eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen’s writings asserted that an independent Parliament was essential to preserve constitutional liberty; however, ministerial power was being used to manipulate and unfairly influence Parliament members and elections. Bribery and the use of preferments were examples of corruption.

The “Country” Party was a political movement, primarily extended from the late 17th century to the mid-18th century, rather than an organized party in Great Britain. The “Country” Party opposed the concentration of power by a corrupt “Court” Party in London, especially objecting to Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s administration, which used patronage to buy influence. The Commonwealthmen, such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, were associated with the “Country” vision of English politics.

Disestablishment is the ending of the policy of a state-supported official religion. An established church was the official church of a nation (or colony); the civil government typically required that all inhabitants pay taxes to maintain the church and imposed penalties on religious dissenters. Although the disestablishment of religion was neither “an original goal nor completely a product of the Revolution” (271), the pressure of Revolutionary ideas of liberty moved American states in the direction of complete religious freedom (the separation of church and state).

The colonists conceptualized liberty as “the exercise, within the boundaries of the law, the natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom” (79). In the Commonwealth tradition, “the preservation of liberty rested on the ability of people to maintain effective checks on the wielders of power” (65). Therefore, the colonists were vigilant, expecting that governmental power was constantly seeking to encroach upon their liberty.

By power, the colonists meant “the dominion of some men over others […] force, compulsion” (56). The Commonwealthmen writers, who influenced the Revolutionary thinkers, viewed power as ceaselessly aggressive with a tendency to expand beyond legitimate boundaries and threaten liberty, which needed to be defended. What transformed power into a dangerous force was the nature of humans—their susceptibility to corruption and their lust for self-aggrandizement.

The idea of representation in government had developed in the colonies in an opposite direction from practices in Great Britain. Due to colonial circumstances, such as the largely autonomous colonial towns, colonists expected to bind representatives to local interests, as in Massachusetts town meetings. For the colonists, the theory of “virtual” representation—that the British Parliament spoke for all British subjects no matter where they lived—made no sense since their representation was tied to local interests.

“Natural rights” were initially “defined in a significantly ambiguous way” as both the inalienable rights inherent in people and “the concrete specifications of English law” (77). The colonists believed that mankind’s natural, inalienable rights were God-given, so no laws could ever wholly specify “the great treasury of human rights” (78). Laws merely “marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right” (78), such as life, liberty, and private property.

Chattel slavery refers to the practice of enslaving and owning a human being as a piece of property. There was an additional 18th-century definition of “slavery” used by the patriot writers to mean a specific political condition when subjects were under an arbitrary and tyrannical government, having lost their rights “which a proper constitution guaranteed a free people” (233). The use of the term “slavery” by the Revolutionary writers to describe their fears about their political condition eventually highlighted the discrepancy between their quest for freedom and the practice of slaveholding in America.

Sovereignty is the ultimate political power, “higher in legal authority than any other power” (198) in a state. The 18th-century English theory of sovereignty was indivisible, unlimited power. However, existing circumstances in the colonies enabled Americans to realize that government sovereignty could be beneficially divided among different levels of institutions in a federalist system and prevent the central government from amassing too much power.

In pre-Revolutionary America, the Tories were colonists who identified with traditional conservatism of the Tory political movement in England, which generally supported monarchy and the Church of England. Colonial Tories often perceived the radical repercussions of the developing Revolutionary ideas early. During the Revolutionary War, the American Tories were known as Loyalists to the crown; their property was confiscated and redistributed after the war.